Monday, June 22, 2009

Weekly Update - The Heat, training, and Lance

Weather had been crap for the first week after getting back from San Francisco. Rain, storms, sticky air. Miserable. I rode into work last Wednesday, only commute #12 on the year. When I left my house in the morning, it was 75 degrees with 94% humidity. The ride home that afternoon was about 20 degrees hotter but nowhere near as humid. Still hot and miserable. The hair-drying-in-the-face wind was lovely to. Hit up Joe's BBQ on Saturday. Rain came through but blew over just in time for the outdoor festivities. I only got in about 1hour on the MTB(paved trail/gravel road only) so I tried to make up for that on Sunday. Got in a solid 3 hours on the road bike and included 3 laps around Lake Quivera (Holiday Drive, up Quivera Rd to Johnson Drive, Johnson Drive west to Renner, North on Renner back to Holiday). Plenty of climbing on this loop. Nice and hot since I was out there at Noon. I managed to get the first 2 hours in with one bottle, but the last hour involved riding from one drinking fountain to the next. I might need to start some indoor workouts. Hard to get any high-HR stuff going in this heat.

Warning: the following is simply my opinion!Lance winning Nevada City! Why race the Tour de Suisse with the rest of your Astana team and prepare for the Tour when you can stay in the U.S and beat some domestic pro's. He isn't expected to be a factor at the Tour anyway (my opinion), but he keeps dragging Levi to these U.S. races, when Levi should be in Europe. I'm guessing Levi will now NOT be a factor at the Tour either because of this. My prediction is that the Tour winner is in Europe now and recently done one of the more-traditional Tour prep races like the Dauphine, Swiss Tour, ect. Of course there is something financial going on here. Most of those 20,000+ fans would not have been there if Lance wasn't there. Almost as bad as ProTour riders skipping ProTour races in Europe to race small races in the U.S., Ben Jacques-Maynes got 2nd behind Lance and ahead of Levi. I'm sure come December, we'll see Ben take his Pro Road/Cyclocross hat off for a day, and somehow race (and probably win) the AMATURE Masters class at 'cross Nationals. That's the end of my opinion.

Heat Advisory all this week is nice. With the SMP trails finally open, I've been desperately trying to get my MTB tech skills back on par. Been a few weeks so i'm very rusty. Been out there the last two nights and it's been a steam bath in there. That place seems to get rockier and rockier every time i ride there, or maybe that's just me and/or the hardtail and/or the heat. Hmmmm. Went out there again last night (before the big storm came through) and finally got some good technical speed work in. The Niner is a handfull at slow speed but as long as you keep it pinned, things tend to smooth out a bit. After the rain I figured the trails would be closed today, so it was commute #13 today.